The reviews are unanimous in their approval, and consistent about why. Most critics take Jenji Kohan’s women’s prison series to be a good deal more than its fish-out-of-water premise, and the praise gathers around the same two things: an ensemble of largely unfamiliar actors given room to become full characters, and a flashback structure that hands each of them a history. Several note that it balances comedy with something harder without letting either win, and that the humour is sharper and less pleased with itself than the setting suggests.
Reservations are mild and few. Variety finds it messy and uneven in places, and Radio Times thinks the opening premise, a middle-class woman sent down, is the predictable part of an otherwise fresh show. The spread is narrow, running from warm to warmer, with nobody dissenting. The later notices, written after several series, treat it as a show that changed what television ensembles could look like.